Dammit! I came into this thread to say the A-Team!
Handle with Care, starring Troy McClure (whom you might remember from such mid-season replacements as Buck Henderson, Union Buster and Troy and Company’s Summertime Smile Factory). They were the original odd couple!
Very true, but you may be underestimating the staggeringly large audience share the Superbowl brings in.
American Idol is an unprecedented behemoth; a ratings juggernaut the likes of which television has never seen before. It has season debuts of around 36 million people, and finales of around 46 million. Normal shows that are blockbuster hits (like Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, Desperate Housewives, CSI, etc…) draw in around 26 million.
The Superbowl brings in 90 million viewers. Ninety. As in, double the next highest rated entertainment programming. So if you figure an audience the size of American Idol is lost to drunken stupor, you are still left with the best lead-in in television.
On paper, that seems to be a logical conclusion - but as mentioned, they don’t do scheduling like that anymore so obviously it doesn’t quite work as well as one would think.
Another problem is that with the various time zones and uncertain start times of shows to follow, that could mean that the East coast doesn’t get to see the show until late, and lots of people have to get up on Monday morning - so losing the better part of the East coast due to time, people travelling home, and the drink factor - well, even with that many people tuning in, it is not like they are all comfy at home and ready to watch something else.
Plus, I still maintain that the 90 million number is somewhat skewed - that includes people barely looking at the television and simply in a house or bar where a party is taking place. My personal experience leads me to believe the majority are not really paying all that much attention to the television - unless the game is close (seldom) or there is a nipple to see during the half-time show.
I just roared at that!!
You may think it is a bad time slot, but I am willing to bet that the ratings on the time slot are quite a bit higher than normal ratings for that time of night. Keep in mind that, while on the East Coast the game won’t end until around 10 pm, it’s only 9 in the Central and out on the left coast it’s only 7 pm.
The reason they stopped premiering shows then is simple: it didn’t appear to have any significant effect upon managing to catch a new audience on to the show. Looking at that list on Wiki, there are only three, maybe four shows that premiered after the SB that were hits (and I am most certainly NOT including Airwolf! 
), and it’s a good bet they would have been hits regardless of when they premiered. So, if you want to maximize your value for having that slot, you probably want to use it to boost the ratings of an already established program. You will notice that every program shown starting in 1996 is/was an established hit for the network showing the SB, and some of them at least were being shown on a night they normally were not seen.
I wonder if the strategy does work better on the west coast?
Here, Criminal Minds won’t start right after the game tonight. The game ends - and then there’s a huge break of filler programming (enough to say goodbye and get home - especially if the game is more or less settled by halftime) before the “post superbowl show.”
And because of the east coast problem, it’s the only new show on TV tonight for all 4 hours of primetime.